Chronicles of Canada Volume 01 - The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada

Stephen Leacock, who lived from 1869 to 1944, is remembered above all as a humorist, but he was also a professional economist and a writer on history. The volume recorded here, The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada, was published in 1914 as Volume 1 of the Chronicles of Canada. It sketches the story of the land from the earliest times to the arrival of its first European visitors, and it gives a short history of its Indigenous peoples. The series was designed to tell Canadian history in a scholarly and readable way.

The recording is made up of six chapters. They are titled Before the Dawn, Man in America, The Aborigines of Canada, The Legend of the Norsemen, The Bristol Voyages and Forerunners of Jacques Cartier. In this order they lead from deep time and the first settlement of the continent to the period when explorers began to arrive from across the Atlantic.

It is worth remembering that the book was written more than a century ago. Its terminology and some of its assumptions reflect the knowledge and the attitudes of the early twentieth century, and modern research has revised many points, particularly regarding Indigenous peoples. Even so, it remains a useful window on how Canadians of that time understood their own origins.

The reading lasts a little over two hours and is shared among six LibriVox volunteers. It is a good starting point for those who would like to explore the early history of Canada, and it can be followed by the other volumes of the same series, which carry the story forward.